A DEGREE OF THE SURREAL,

THE NOT-ENTIRELY-REAL,

AND THE MARKEDLY ANTI-REAL

About

1. The turbulent flow of air driven backward by the propeller or propellers of an aircraft. Also called race2.

2. The area of reduced pressure or forward suction produced by and immediately behind a fast-moving object as it moves through air or water.

intr.v.slip·streamed, slip·stream·ing, slip·streams

To drive or cycle in the slipstream of a vehicle ahead.

3. a kind of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction and fantasy and mainstream literary fiction.

The term slipstream was coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye #5, in July 1989. He wrote:

"...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility."

Slipstream fiction has consequently been referred to as "the fiction of strangeness," at the heart of which is a cognitive dissonance..

Slipstream falls between speculative fiction and mainstream fiction. While some slipstream novels employ elements of science fiction or fantasy, not all do. The common unifying factor of these pieces of literature is some degree of the surreal, the not-entirely-real, or the markedly anti-real.

people called it a Hundred Year Flood (some said Four Hundred Year Flood) meaning a flooding so extreme that it occurs only once in a hundred (or four hundred ) years.

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it was a truly strange time.

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back then, I lived with my partner in the enormous, shabby glamour of his fifth floor family apartment. Much of Prague city center had been drowned, blacked out and evacuated. We, on the periphery of the center, were also beginning to be evacuated. In the end, as it transpired, we were not forced to leave because our apartment building was on a hump in the street, which lofted us above the high water mark.

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when I leaned out the window before most of the street was flooded, I saw people moving and meeting in clots and singly in a slow chaotic dance that bore little resemblance to the purposeful hither and thither of normal daysEven at that distance, it was possible to see something had changed.

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later, when we went out to try to find out if we were required to evacuate, we called into one of the cafes higher up where many … continue reading